Salem Hamm

Ava

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our first step at Ava is to empower 466M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world. Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV. Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier. In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the ultimate barrier we need to lift. Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively & authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.